Repackaging programme: Difference between revisions
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[[Limited recourse]] is a trickier proposition when you try it outside the laboratory in the real world. We discuss this in our [[voidable preference]] article. | [[Limited recourse]] is a trickier proposition when you try it outside the laboratory in the real world. We discuss this in our [[voidable preference]] article. | ||
{{emir hedging exemption}} | |||
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*[[Voidable preference]]s | *[[Voidable preference]]s | ||
Revision as of 11:56, 6 June 2022
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The Law and Lore of Repackaging
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A secured medium term note programme created by an espievie captive to the demands of a broker/dealer and used to sell securitised structured products, par asset swaps, credit-linked notes and all that good stuff.
The best ever repackaging programme was Goldman Sachs International's “MaJoR” Multi-Jurisdiction Repackaging Programme[1] which, as its name suggests, was (and as far as I know, still is) as cool as Jon and Ponch.
You know, the ones from TV’s “CHiPs”[2]
A quick word about limited recourse
Secured, limited recourse obligations are de rigueur for multi-issue repackaging SPVs. They save the cost of creating a whole new vehicle for each trade, and really only do by contract what establishing a brand new espievie each time would do through the exigencies of corporation law and the corporate veil. The point is to completely isolate each set of Noteholders from each other. This is a surprisingly narrow point, as we will see, so we should not get carried away for the formalities of security.
With secured, limited recourse obligations there is a quid pro quo: all creditors are known; they are yoked to the same ladder of priorities; they all have agreed to limit their claims to the liquidated value of the secured assets underlying the deal. In return, the espievie grants them a first-ranking security over those assets — mediated between them by the agreed priority structure — and this stopping any interloper happening by and getting its mitts on the espievie’s assets.
The key point to absorb here: this is not a material economic modification to the deal. The line it draws, it draws around all the assets underlying the deal: the underlying securities, cashflows deriving from them, the espievie’s rights against custodians and bankers holding them, and its rights against the swap counterparty — everything, tangible or otherwise, of financial value in the transaction is locked down and pledged to secured parties, and the intercreditor arrangements, too, are fully mapped out. This kind of limited recourse, in fact, doesn’t limit recourse: it maps practical recourse, exactly to the totality of assets that the issuer has available for the purpose: all it saves is the unnecessary process of bankrupting a shell company with nothing left in it in any case. Secured limited recourse is like a nomological machine; a model; it is a simplified account where everything works as it should do, there are no unforeseen contingencies, and all outcomes are planned.
We shouldn’t get too hung up about the whys and wherefores of the security structure of a repackaging as long as it is there, it covers all the rights and assets it is meant to cover, and all necessary perfections and execution formalities are observed. For in a repackaging, the security just sits there and will almost certainly never be exercised.
All that tedious business about automatically releasing it to make payments, powers to appointing receivers, calling and collecting in, the trustee’s rights and obligations under the Law of Property Act 1925 and so on — look it is all good stuff; let your trustee lawyer have his day — but as long as it is there, none of it really matters.
Why? Because — unless you have negligently buggered up your ring-fencing and your Trustee has let you: both of these are quite hard to do — the SPV cannot go insolvent. Any repack redemption will be triggered by an external event: a non-payment on an underlying asset or by a failing counterparty or agent. None relate to the solvency or ability to meet its debts of the Issuer itself.
That being the case, once it exists, the security package will never actually do anything: any diminution in value to of the secured assets — will happen regardless of how strong the security is. The security is a formal belt and brace there to fully isolate from each other the noteholders of different series, and even that only matters only when the SPV is bankrupt. Which is, never.
The limited purpose of the security package in a repackaging is widely misunderstood – all it does is defend against unexpected holes in the ring-fencing.
This is why it is de rigueur to accelerate, liquidate and distribute the proceeds of a repackaged note without enforcement of the security.
Over the years this secured, limited recourse technology has been refined and standardised, and now plays little part in the education of a modern-day structured finance lawyer, though, at his mother’s knee, he might once have been told fairy stories about what became of poor Fidgety Phillip when he carelessly put “extinction” rather than “no debt due” in a pricing supplement on his way home from school and burned to death.[3]
Limited recourse is a trickier proposition when you try it outside the laboratory in the real world. We discuss this in our voidable preference article.
EMIR “Hedging exemption”
The question may arise as to whether an SPV is a non-financial counterparty and, if it is, whether article 10.3 of EMIR means you don’t have to engage in all that tedious measuring of notionals to ensure you stay small enough to count as an NFC-. Here’s what the hedging exemption says:
3. In calculating the positions referred to in paragraph 1, the non-financial counterparty shall include all the OTC derivative contracts entered into by the non-financial counterparty or by other non-financial entities within the group to which the non-financial counterparty belongs, which are not objectively measurable as reducing risks directly relating to the commercial activity or treasury financing activity of the non-financial counterparty or of that group.
Repackaging SPVs
Now this seems squarely to capture the derivative activity of a limited recourse repackaging SPV, which is entering derivatives to pass the cashflow of an asset, and receiving a cashflow to pay down a note. Even if you muff up the structuring, the “limited recourse” nature of an SPV forces a careful observer to the conclusion that an SPV who transacts derivatives in this way is “objectively measurably reducing risks directly relating it its commercial activity” — it is eliminating them in point of fact — and given the underlying security structure of such a deal (where the SPV secures its rights to the asset whose cashflow it is manufacturing in favour of the dealer to whom it is manufacturing that income stream) requiring the SPV to also post collateral as a credit mitigant makes no sense at all. There is no credit risk. The asset is the perfect delta-one hedge.
Nevertheless, this must have seemed too easy for some of the more curmudgeonly compliance professionals on the continent, and at the time of the EMIR refit the question arose as to whether this would cover SPVs (such as repackaging vehicles whose principal activity is to deal in financial instruments). The ESMA Q&A[4] posed, on page 28, this question:
Can non-financial counterparties (NFCs) whose core activity is to buy, sell or own financial instruments, benefit from the hedging exemption when using OTC derivative contracts to hedge certain risks, for example risks arising from the potential indirect impact on the value of assets the NFC buys, sells or owns resulting from the fluctuations of interest rates, inflation rates, foreign exchange rates or credit risk?
And came forth the answer, on page 30:
Yes. The hedging exemption set out in Article 10(3) EMIR applies to all non-financial counterparties, irrespective of what their core activity is. The list of financial counterparties in Article 2(8) EMIR is a closed list. It does not allow for the treatment of non-financial counterparties as financial counterparties for certain EMIR provisions, such as Article 10(3). That provision itself does not distinguish which non-financial counterparty is allowed to use the hedging exemption depending on that counterparty’s specific activity.
AIFs
Though, trick for the young players — an AIF is a form of financial counterparty, so does not qualify for the hedging exemption.
See also
- Voidable preferences
- Limited recourse generally
References
- ↑ Patent applied for!
- ↑ Youngsters: Let me Google that for you.
- ↑ Come to think of it he may have forgotten to file a Slavenburg.
- ↑ Which you can find here.